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Page 11
 

Blood on the Golden Sands 
by Lim Kean Siew
Pelanduk
 

A MAN STANDS ON THE JETTY.  He stares unbelievingly at the ferry which has cast off and is moving away, across to Butterworth. The deserted man is Lim Khoon Teck, magistrate. “Stunned, he watched the entire contingent cast off and sail into the midnight mists in silence and in stealth”, so writes Lim Kean Siew in his book on the Japanese occupation 

Koon Teck has been ordered to meet at the pier where he and the other officers of the British administration are to flee Penang for their safety. It is the 13th December 1941. The Japanese are almost within reach of Province Wellesley. Every day, at 10.30 in the morning, bombers marked with the red sun on their wings, roar menacingly overhead; they are from Mata Kuching, which the Japanese air force has seized, on bombing missions to the Dutch East Indies. It is feared that as a magistrate and officer of the Straits Settlements Volunteer Corps “C” Company, Lim Koon Teck will be executed by the Japanese. But when the ferry is ready, he and his family are told: No you can’t go with us, the ferry is for Whites only

Thus did the colonials, disparagingly described by Noel Coward as a second-rate people in a first-rate country desert their dream colony. Ian Morrison of The Times was to write: “The British… had ratted out of Penang, had thought of saving no skins but their own, and left the Asiatics to their fate at the hands of the Japs…” (see Note)

But one brave man refused to leave with the rats. He was the CMO of the General Hospital, Dr E B Evans who, Lim Kean Siew says should have been honoured “for maintaining the best of British traditions in the face of utmost danger” 

Lim Kean Siew describes the chaos that followed when the bombs fell on the morning of the 11th and the flow of panic stricken refugees from the city who “ran as fast as they could to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the destruction they had witnessed” 

Fortunately for Penang island, Lim Koon Teck and his volunteers of Company “C” were to become the accepted backbone of law and order in the tiny village of Ayer Itam on which fearful Georgetown had descended. The story of how the author’s father, Lim Cheng Ean, by sheer force of reputation and personality and with the help of “C”Company brought order out of chaos deserves a book by itself. For the moment we have to be content with what this book tells us.
 
 

Lim Kean Siew considered himself “a victim of war as well as victim of colonialism. I believed in British might and superiority. Even after the bombs fell in Singapore I still believed in the superior might of the British armed forces ..”. It was this colonial trance that led him and others to take the train from Singapore to Penang on the 9th , right into the arms of the enemy. 

The bombing of Penang stopped when Saravanamuttu hauled the Union Jack down at Fort Cornwallis to signal to the Japanese that Penang was an open city. Or so it was thought, until Saravanamuttu revealed in his memoirs that the credit went to an apprentice rider called Ivan Allan and a trainer, George Mcgill, who had bravely cycled to tell the Japanese at Sungei Patani on the 18th that Penang was an undefended city

 “An open truck would come down the street slowly with hooded men inside who would identify any one they wanted by a nod in his direction. The few soldiers accompanying the truck would then reach out and grab the man and throw him inside the prison van (accompanying the truck) amidst the protest and weeping of women”. The book tells us of close friends who are discovered to be murderous informers and toadies: “We were surprised to discover after the war that among them were school friends who had shared with us our meagre rations during the war in our house. They were not only friends but a few of them were close friends”

The unspeakable cruelty of the soldiers has already been recorded by Dr Yoshimuru Mako in an article in The Star of August 14, 2000. The Kempeitai brought with them new forms of torture: the water treatment where the victim was force-fed with water until his stomach distended and then kicked about like a football, the flying trapeze where the suspect was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists and punched from wall to wall and the ice treatment where the prisoner was made to sit naked on a block of ice with a fan blowing at full blast. To the disgust of their loyal citizens, the British adopted the flying trapeze and the ice block when they returned in 1945. However it appears that they found the other Japanese refinements of torture not to their taste.

From the collection "Chop Suey" by Liu Kang

1354 Days

The terror was to last 1354 days. Then, high up in the skies, came the B-29s, the Flying Fortresses, the harbingers of liberation. In Bangkok, the author witnessed “one of the planes was suddenly caught in the beam of a search light probing the sky, began to shine like a silver cigar in the heavens... I then knew where my loyalties lay. Everything fell into place.” 

The end was near. Yet Penang was fearful of the end. The fierce, suicidal battles of Okinawa and Guan were ominous. Rangoon had been taken and the Japanese were on the retreat. It was rumoured that the British would land in Penang and make it the springboard for their reconquest of Malaya. There was no doubt that Penang would be destroyed. Then the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan  surrendered. But would the troops here obey the Emperor, or would they fight to the finish? 

It was a relief when the news spread that the Penang garrison would obey orders; there was an explosion of quiet but exuberant celebrations behind closed doors. The end came peacefully when Captain Wong and his intelligence unit landed on North Beach armed with lists of Japanese agents. Penang's nightmare was over.

__________

Note: As quoted by Margaret Shennan in “Out in the Midday Sun”